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4-3 Ruling Effectively Halts Death Penalty in New York

New York State's highest court ruled yesterday that a central provision of the state's capital punishment law violated the State Constitution. Lawyers said the ruling would probably spare the lives of the four men now on death row and effectively suspend the death penalty in New York.

The 4-to-3 ruling from the State Court of Appeals in Albany went well beyond the particulars of a single case, giving opponents of the law an important victory. Besides the four death-row inmates, lawyers said, it could spare the lives of nine defendants fighting capital cases and more than 30 others whose murder cases are in early stages. Because the case was decided on state constitutional grounds, it is also expected to provide a broad new legal foundation for untold future challenges to the state's death penalty.

The ruling left the capital punishment law itself intact, providing that the Legislature repairs the provision that the court said was flawed. But the court's majority said, ''Under the present statute, the death penalty may not be imposed.''

No one has been executed under the law, which was passed in 1995 with the fervent support of Gov. George E. Pataki. Some juries have resisted imposing capital punishment and some district attorneys have declined to seek it at trial. The last execution in New York, under a previous death penalty law, was in 1963.

The court's majority said the Legislature improperly required judges to tell jurors in capital cases that if they deadlocked and failed to reach a verdict during the penalty phase of a trial, the judge would impose a sentence that would leave the defendant eligible for parole after 20 to 25 years. The decision said that instruction had the effect of coercing jurors to vote for execution, because they might fear that a vote against it would lead to the eventual release of people charged with extraordinarily violent or otherwise shocking murders.

''The deadlock instruction,'' the majority said, ''gives rise to an unconstitutionally palpable risk that one or more jurors who cannot bear the thought that a defendant may walk the streets again after serving 20 to 25 years will join jurors favoring death in order to avoid the deadlock sentence.''

The majority decision, by Judge George Bundy Smith, said the deadlock provision violated the State Constitution's guarantee of due process of law. Lawyers said yesterday's ruling left little ground for review by any federal court. Including yesterday's decision, the Court of Appeals has overturned a death sentence four times since the law was enacted.

The governor and legislative leaders said yesterday that they would move quickly to repair the law. The leaders of the State Senate and Assembly have both said they favor the death penalty. But legislative politics and the volatility of the capital punishment issue left it unclear how quickly the penalty might be restored.

Some prosecutors said yesterday that they were working on amendments to the law that could quickly revive the death penalty. Several of them said publicly that they believed that the remaining death-row inmates might be able to be resentenced to death under a new law. But several of them conceded that the courts might not approve such death sentences.

The dissent, by three judges all appointed by Governor Pataki, said the decision reflected an effort by the majority to stall the application of the death penalty in the state. ''Today's decision, in our view,'' the dissent said, ''elevates judicial distaste for the death penalty over the legislative will.''

The ruling affirmed the conviction of Stephen LaValle, a former Long Island roofer who raped and killed a Suffolk County schoolteacher, Cynthia Quinn, in 1997, stabbing her 73 times. But the court sent the case back for sentencing of Mr. LaValle, now 37. The court said a trial judge was to sentence him to a life term, perhaps one that included the possibility of parole.

Critics of capital punishment maintained even during legislative debates about the law in 1995 that the deadlock provision, which the Court of Appeals said was unique among the nation's capital punishment laws, coerced jurors to vote for death, but some critics say such legal arguments gained little traction in a Legislature convinced that the public strongly favored capital punishment.

Some prosecutors say the deadlock provision was intended to encourage jurors to make the difficult choice between life without parole and death that is presented to them in capital cases. These prosecutors say the provision has helped some death penalty juries reach a decision by suggesting that a defendant may someday go free if they do not reach a verdict.

But in a statement yesterday, the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas Spota, whose office prosecuted Mr. LaValle's case, said juries needed to be able to be sure ''that in the event of a deadlock, the defendant whom they found guilty of first-degree murder would be sentenced to life in prison without parole.'' He added that he believed that such a sentence would be rational ''in these specific circumstances.''

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The decision was a major victory for the New York Capital Defender Office, a state-financed legal office that handled the appeals of Mr. LaValle and the three other men whose death sentences have been overturned by the Court of Appeals since the law went into effect. Death penalty supporters have said the capital defenders are working to get what amounts to a moratorium on the death penalty by deluging the court with one technical legal argument after another.

Mr. Pataki yesterday called the ruling disappointing, while Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican Senate majority leader, called it irresponsible, adding that it ''could ultimately jeopardize the lives of New Yorkers by placing dangerous, violent criminals back on the streets.''

Some prosecutors around the state criticized the decision, saying the judges appeared to be searching for reasons to avoid approving any death sentence. ''From the perspective of a prosecutor, there's tremendous frustration right now,'' said Mike Green, the Monroe County district attorney. ''In case after case, it seems they're looking for a way to set the death sentences aside.'

But the chief Capital Defender, Kevin M. Doyle, called the decision a victory for common sense. Mr. Doyle, acknowledging that some critics of the court had said its prior rulings overturning death sentences were made on technical grounds, argued, ''Nobody can claim the provision that was found unconstitutional was anything but dangerous and unfair.''

Some trial judges have held that the deadlock provision is unconstitutional and have refused to tell juries in advance that in a deadlock, the law requires judges to impose sentences that may permit release on parole. But the majority in the Court of Appeals ruling said the failure to give that jury instruction did not fix the problem, because jurors should not be left to speculate about the possibility of a killer going free someday on parole.

The dissent, written by Governor Pataki's most recent appointee to the court, Judge Robert S. Smith, called the ruling ''an astonishing holding'' that improperly supplanted the role of the Legislature. The other dissenting judges were Victoria A. Graffeo and Susan Phillips Read.

The dissent said the majority had invented a new constitutional right ensuring that a jury in a capital case would be told in advance that a deadlock would mean a sentence of life in prison without parole.

''The existence of such a right finds no support in precedent, and none in logic except on the premise that death penalty defendants are constitutionally entitled to every procedural advantage the human mind can devise,'' the dissent said.

Judge George Bundy Smith and two of the other judges in the majority, Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye and Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, were appointed by Governor Pataki's Democratic predecessor, Mario M. Cuomo.

The only Pataki appointee in the majority, Albert M. Rosenblatt, a former Dutchess County district attorney, is viewed by some lawyers as ambivalent about capital punishment.

Some prosecutors said yesterday that they were still studying the decision. The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said he was ''not prepared to draw any conclusions'' as to whether the death sentence obtained by his prosecutors would stand for John B. Taylor, who was convicted of murder in a massacre at a Wendy's restaurant in Flushing in 2000.

The two other men on death row are Robert Shulman, who bludgeoned and dismembered three prostitutes on Long Island in 1994 and 1995, and Nicholson McCoy, who sodomized and killed a female co-worker at a Suffolk grocery store in 1998.

Michael A. Arcuri, the president of the New York State District Attorneys Association, said his members had concluded that the legal problem identified by the court could be repaired by the Legislature.

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A version of this article appears in print on June 25, 2004, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: 4-3 Ruling Effectively Halts Death Penalty in New York. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe